the last VICTORIAN war : 1939-1945

Looking over today's crop of leaders in politics, business and culture and comparing them with the world leaders of the 1940s, one is struck by today's leaders' comparative youth.

By contrast, the world of WWII was run by the white-haired teenagers of the Victorian Age.


Normally war is said to be an event for young men and young men's energy, but between1939-1945 the young men silently and glumly marched off to fight, while back home - in charge - the old men postponed their retirements and found a second wind.

They would replay WWI all over and this time, run it their way - not the way of their fathers.

Today's teenagers view the reforming (thermosetting) promises of  Scientism through the cynical and disappointed eyes of 125 years of broken promises, but the eternal teenagers who ran WWII were born in the first flush of the Age of Scientism and never stopped believing.

They still remained as hopeful that Scientism's reforming promises would finally deliver when the last of them died in the early 1970s as when they were still the naively optimistic teenagers of the years of good Queen Victoria's reign.

WWII was not uniquely a war between scientists and technologists - one could make the case that the Napoleonic wars and last year's war were also wars between scientists and technologists.

the last war of unalloyed SCIENTISM : 1939-1945

But it was uniquely the only big war fought between true believers in reform Scientism on all sides : Allies, Axis and Neutrals.

But reform Scientism delivered its first big disappointments in that war , signally failed to do what it had long pledged it could do, if only it was given its head and released from the shackles of old outdated sentiments.

As a permanent reminder of that failure, reform Scientism's seventy years on Earth by 1945 were marked by that war's seventy million dead : a million for each year of Scientism's existence....

1939-1945 : the War of Scientism's modernist "Four Freedoms"

In the Spring of 1939, at the the New York World's Fair, Modernity or Scientism (the words are totally inter-changable) promised the deserving parts of the world a future of Four Freedoms: eventual freedom from material limitations, from catastrophes like the weather, from dependence upon lesser breeds and beings and, above all , from uncertainty.

In Fall of 1945, another set of Four Freedoms - originating from a speech given by  FDR in January 1941 - seemed to offer all the world's human beings a more credible and attractive life --- if equally set at some distant date in the future.

But also in the Fall of 1945, a few people, on the way to becoming post-modernist, were beginning to ask whether even those Four Freedoms were an adequate or accurate rebuttal to Modernism's Four Freedoms.

Today, to be fully post-Modernist  and to be fully post-Scientism , to be fully in the Twenty First Century , is to totally accept the permanent existence of material limitations, catastrophes, uncertainty and the right of existence for lesser breeds and lesser beings.

So there we have it : the rise and the fall of Scientism, from apogee to nadir ....

1939 & 2039 : does the first world CATASTROPE hold useful lessons for the second ?

WWII : first global man-made Catastrophe

God it feels so good to be able to use the words catastrophe and science in the same sentence and not get immediately strung up from the nearest tree by a bunch of foaming-at-the-mouth raving atheists.

That is one of the inalienable freedoms we gained as we moved into today's post-hegemonic age.

We can now call WWII for what it truly was : a global - man-made - catastrophe.

And if current educated guesstimates are at all accurate, 100 years after this first global catastrophe caused by Man, we'll be well stuck in the next man-made catastrophe : runaway global warming meltdown.

It looks to be far far worse than even 1939-1945 was at its very worst .

The catastrophe of Modernity's very own war

So if there are any scraps of lessons we can salvage from the wreck that was Modernity's very own war, let us by all means find them and apply them, while there still is time.

A scientific cum political ideology can be spectacularly successful rhetorically if it chooses to never test its theories in the real world.

But if its Utopian scientific illusions are not in tune with the physicality and the restraints and limits of the real natural world,  it will fail catastrophically when fully challenged.

That is what Modernity discovered in early 1943,  on the steppes of Russia, in the waters of the Pacific and the organic chemistry labs of Oxford University.

In 1939-1945 ,The Rhetoric of Modernity hit The Physicality of Reality (and just guess who won ?)

Can our world, particularly our world at war, get along without natural resources (such as most people) - substituting pure mental ingenuity instead?

Which is to ask, " was the war of 1939-1945 better labelled 'SOLOW'S WAR' ?"


Fundamentally, the leading lights of the Allies , as well as those of the Axis , would have agreed.


(As would the elites of most of the Neutrals, if they had been asked to think about it).


They all thought that, in the end, human mental MINDpower could surmount anything MATERIAL that Mother Nature could throw at them : be it a feast of bad weather or a famine of natural rubber.


Now nobody started an aggressive war (or conducted a defensive war) between 1939 and 1945 because of the economic theories of Robert Solow.


He was only 15 when the war began and he didn't utter his immortal quote that:

       "If it is very easy to substitute other factors for natural resources, then there is, in principle, no problem. The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources. 

("The Economics of Resources or the Resources of Economics.") Robert M. Solow. The American Economic Review, Vol. 64 

until 1974, 35 years later.

Besides as which, the theory hardly originated with Professor Solow --- it would be far, far better to lay credit where credit is due , at the feet of English Chemist John Dalton and his multitude of disciples in all the scientific and quasi-scientific disciplines.

But Solow is the one who has made the concept famous in contemporary times and who can say whether Dalton might have changed his views, in the lighter of newer scientific knowledge, if he had lived that long.

Robert Solow is still alive, has never fundamentally denounced this claim and so let him wear it.

Solow and Dalton's theory is basically a re-statement of The Good News Law (the First law of Thermodynamics) without the awkwardness of The Bad News Law (the Second Law of Thermodynamics) raining on the parade.

One could call The First Law of Thermodynamics the apogee of human hubris, just as the Second law of Thermodynamics is its nadir.

But haven't I already used that line to describe WWII  ?

And your point being ?

A war history that isn't just about the clash of WILLS -- impossible ?

I hope my account of WWII is a gripping, paper-turning, human-interest story - but I hope it isn't of interest to humans because it is all about humans and all about humans only.

When War History ( capital W, capital H) is seen only through the prism of the clash of human wills, it ends up as just university-level  navel gazing : navel-gazing with tenure.

War can be more accurately seen as the clash of various human wills with other human wills and all of these wills clashing with the material limitations of Reality.

I really would have loved to entitle this blog as:
"1939-1945: REALITY's side of the story."

But I feared that it would simply come across as just another tell-all  recounting of  this perpetually popular  'epic clash of human will' .

Reality merely being a codeword for 'yet newer archival revelations about human conduct'.

Now describing Reality, that Universe we all swim in, as Nature clearly has its dangers.

(Because when Reality is reduced to Nature , it is as if its limitations are seen as existing in a lesser, parallel world from the limitless mental world of us humans.

That is our familiar delusionary world of 'name it and claim it', 'dare to dream', 'mind over matter' , 'where there is a will there is a way' , etc.

Thankfully in much of today's conventional thought , The Natural World is often seen as extending to include everything just short of human mental thoughts - ie it does included our mortal fallible bodies and their material needs.

That is a definition of Nature I can sort of live with, though I personally believe our mental activities are just as much a part of the Natural World as my pet dog's daydreams.

So when reading this blog, recast your image of Nature  to encompassing everything in the Universe, including our mental reveries, and you'll do just fine....

Vita Con Mensa: 1939-1945

Did anything else happen between 1939 and 1945 besides WWII?

Was there ever a possibility that the world could have gotten along  more or less in peace, muddling through, between 1939 and 1945?

Is there a possibility of an alternative history for 1939-1945?

I think that Martin Henry Dawson's tiny natural
penicillin project(1939-1945) ,offered one such alternative.

An alternative approach for the civilized portion of Humankind to take to Nature and other weaker/poorer/darker Human Beings than the hostile approach they did take.

So then 1939-1945 offers the possibility of two intertwining, parallel, stories - the big (unsustainably evil) one that the Modern World did take and the alternative small (sustainably decent) path that Dawson's team chose to trod.

'Begin by Comparing and Contrasting' , says every teacher - and it seems a good approach to take here as well ....

a poem: "After the Bombers"

After the Bad Penny,
... an emerald sign,
above our lake of fire

a poem : "After the Bombers"

modernity pours
lakes of fire from up above ;
while Unnoticed,
Beneath our feet,
a green sign
appears...

1939-1945: the second WORD war.....

That is not a typo: I am interested in the abject historical neglect of the extent to which WWII was a war fought by words as well as by weapons .

No popular audiences wanted the war, so every leading nation at
war had to woo a large number of audiences.

First it had to deal with the concerns of its domestic population - civilians at home and their 'boys' under arms overseas.

Then your allies - their governments and their restless domestic audiences.

The neutrals - you hoped to move them to allies or away from your opponents to at least true neutrality.

Your opponents' domestic population and maybe even their military and elite.

The occupied people and one's colonial  populations were extremely important.

A moment's attention would lead one to quickly see the need to divide all these big populations into many subsets, each with their own unique concerns and need for unique messaging.

I tend to think very "election-ly" about everything , so I tend to see the war as a six year long election campaign fought between three major political parties (and a lot of lesser ones) for the hearts and minds of the world's electorate.

Each party laid forth its claims of virtue and attacked the others' shortfall between their virtues claimed and their very sorry failings in practice.

The three parties?

The ANGLO SAXON Atlantic Charter (Four Freedoms) Party , the GERMAN SAXON New Order Party and the JAPANESE SAXON Co-Prosperity Sphere Party....

A "glass-half-full" history of WWII

My book was inspired by an important poll of Americans seeking to determine the most important news story of the entire 20th Century.

In 1999, over 36,000 American men and women told the Newseum and USA Weekend magazine that the single most important event of the 20th Century involved a little boy and a baby girl and happened on a tiny island not far off the American coast back in the 1940s.

Actually the men and women divided by gender - the men pointing to the baby boy as story number one  and the women saying the baby girl was the most important.

The men , backed up by tenured, professional, important historians, said that WWII ended in a BANG, and gave a downcast glass-half-empty account of the war's end.

By contrast the women looked up from the diapers and said the war ended hopefully with a WHIMPER, and in their view the glass was half-full.

I too take this view and decided to write a green revisionist history of 1939-1945 that sees the outcome as more hopeful than not.

My view of WWII may owe more to Alexander Pope and Francois
Rabelais than to the academic Dunces of my own era but so be it....